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This special issue on L1 Teacher Education has generated considerable enthusiasm – it represents the first issue emerging from a new Special Interest Group on L1 Teacher Education in the International Association of Mother Tongue Education. As editors, we found that the articles fall into two groups: Teacher preparation at the university (three articles) followed by teacher practices in the schools. Researchers from three regions – Europe, Australia and the Middle East – wrote the articles that highlight the international and global diversity of L1 educators and education, while nevertheless conducting reflexive dialogue about L1 teaching and learning across national boundaries.
The currency of writing research includes terms with which we believe we are all familiar. But frustration can quickly dominate cross-cultural exchange when the meanings of these apparently obvious terms seem to be just beyond our collective reach. The contribution uses translation theory, linguistic analysis, and educational theory to present key terms apparently shared by academic writing researchers and teachers in France and the United States, but in fact serving as obstacles to understanding because of their culture-specific, discipline-specific or institution-specific uses.
The writing program at Cornell University involves professors from across the disciplines teaching writing courses at each level of students' undergraduate careers. This program undertook an assessment of its effectiveness in the years 2002-2004. The process of creating and carrying out an assessment developed by professors involved in the program is reported, and the assessment results are presented. These results lead the writer to argue for the assessment process itself as a key experience in developing the disciplinary awareness of participating professors, who became involved in deep questioning of what 'good' student writing might be in higher education, and in what relationship to the language practices of each discipline. The assessment project's challenges and benefits support the value of assessment of students' work across disciplines as fundamentally owned by each discipline.
Any overview of the topic of American Research on College Composition for the forty-five year period 1960-2005 is bound to be at a high level of generality and not comprehensive. What follows is a quick guide to some of the main themes that animated this era of composition research, with particular emphasis on the gap between college professors in newly-formed and rapidly growing composition programs who focused upon college-level writers, and more traditional researchers based in colleges of education who focused upon primary and secondary school students. As my survey will show, these two groups of researchers once talked to each other, but over forty-five years gradually drew apart, much to their mutual loss. The college professors of composition studies have tended to conduct qualitative research, while scholars in colleges of education have tended to conduct quantitative research. In one sense, then, my survey is of a loss of coherence, a parting of the ways in which two rich traditions of research flourished but inevitably grew apart.
The study of the role of language activity in higher education in France has been evolving, in the past few years, out of the larger field of ‘la didactique du français,' the field of L1 teaching and theory across all grade levels. This larger frame has provided several themes that are now being explored in higher education writing: language activity as a mode of co-construction of knowledge in school settings rather than a transparent medium, writing, reading and speaking as intimately disciplinary activities, writing as a recursive process, speaking and writing as complementary, and the reconfiguration of the discipline of L1 French as a result of these explorations.
This issue offers a preliminary yet in-depth introduction to research about the teaching and learning of literate activity across the disciplines in higher education in France and the United States: its academic values, educational principles, and genres. The contributing authors represent the forefront of research in each culture; the contributions identify history and evolution, current frames and questions, and a glossary of relevant terms. The issue thus foregrounds convergences across the cultures in terms of the rejection of a "transmission" model of literate activity and a symbiosis between language and disciplinary content. It foregrounds divergences in terms of theoretical frames, disciplines informing the research, and degree of attention paid specifically to higher education. The contributions lay out valuable future research paths.
This paper presents a small-scale study that examines the relationship between spoken and written discourse among master's level teacher candidates at an urban American university. It analyzes the writing of teacher candidates before and after the introduction of a student-centered, group interaction methodology, the Nominal Group Technique. Some of the specific areas assessed are the relationship between what students said in their groups and what they wrote in essays, interaction dynamics among teacher candidates in groups, observer perceptions of group behaviors, and teacher candidates' perceptions of writing performance before and after the intervention. The study also assesses teacher candidates' essays (N = 9) and compares them to the essays of a control group (N = 8). A significant increase in scores is noted from pretest to posttest after the treatment. Reaction to the class experience was largely positive. Pedagogic implications arising from findings are considered together with some tentative pointers toward future research.
This paper describes the current approach to the instruction of Hebrew as a mother-tongue (L1) language based on technological developments and on the relationship between technology and pedagogy. As such, we rely on well-known models of integrating computerized tools and distance learning in the educational system, while emphasizing the potential contribution of these environments to L1 education. At the core of this paper is the combination of linguistic and didactic approaches to L1 teaching that bring together both theoretical and functional aspects of learning and teaching language via a computer. The focus here is on technologically-based L1 learning environments that combine different types of computerized tools within a comprehensive language-learning/teaching system that is designed for facilitating and improving language skills. This system is cognitively motivated, and is modeled on a combination of elements, such as principles of constructivist, social, and active learning. The structural-conceptual framework of this environment complies with principles of both local and global connectivity and hierarchy. For example, at the local level, learning materials are connected through a hypertext structure; at the global level, the entire system is inter-connected, with assignments linked to dictionaries and relevant websites, and the learners themselves connected through email and forums. The teaching/learning processes that take place within this L1 environment are illustrated by examples of both online and offline computerized courses.
This article presents a research project conducted in a class of secondary school (first year) which linked reading, writing and acting. In this project, the teacher attempted to provide a support system for both first and second language acquisition. The idea was to use Greek tales published in a simplified version to look for ideas, vocabulary, routines, in other words what students were able to use when they acted then wrote the text of their own play. This constant back and forth between the oral and written format under the guidance of the expert formed the backbone of the system designed to help them discover a language beyond the daily contacts and a deep displeasure at school. With the help of the adults and of the mediating tools such as literature and acting they were able to collectively write a play that integrated many aspects of written French. In books they discovered worlds beyond their own that they can access when they open and use them. These crucial lessons, not only for students who are considered unable to study with a standard curriculum but also for teachers who are to work with them or similar students, serve to question notions such as creative drama and literacy.
This study conducted in Hong Kong used multiple regression procedures to investigate the relationship between primary school children's reading test scores and the frequency with which forty-two instructional practices were used by their literacy teachers. Analyses were conducted separately for reading in English language and in Chinese (Modern Standard Written Chinese). Subjects comprised 4,329 Cantonese-speaking students (2,157 girls; 2,172 boys) aged approximately 9+ years, and their 256 teachers (129 teachers of English; 127 teachers of Chinese). Results suggest that no single instructional practice was highly correlated with students' reading achievement in English or Chinese, and in fact some practices demonstrated a negative association. However, certain practices, particularly related to the use and nature of resource materials and to assessment strategies, did demonstrate a positive association with reading performance. Similarities and differences between Chinese and English data are discussed.
Based on a comparison between 11 year old students who are monolingual French and bilingual French and Kabyle (one of the Berber languages) our research aims at showing how two specific factors influence understanding narratives: the first is the mode of presentation (oral vs written). It is combined with cultural aspects of the 1st language (from now on L1) in which children have been socialized; the task was a written recall of a Kabyle text. Our results show facilitating effects of the oral mode to access meaning and the positive role played by culture in mediating understanding, hence founding potential solutions to improve literacy in standard French in areas where the cultural diversity in the school population is very often associated with difficulties in learning the school language. Teaching should switch from an ethno-centered model to a multicultural one since to build knowledge requires explaining the symbolic systemic relations languages and cultures have with one another.
In recent years, certain political changes have occurred in the Turkish Cypriot community with the accession of Cyprus to the European Union. Policies and parties in favor of this accession accepted the idea of a united Cyprus; the majority of the Turkish Cypriots (65%) voted in favor of a Cypriot identity. Such political transformations affected education as well. As one of the results of these new policies, a course entitled "Turkish Cypriot Literature" was introduced in schools. In this article we report a study on the ideology, content and instruction of the TCL course. In this study a questionnaire was given to high school teachers and students in order to find out their views about the ideology, content and instruction of the course. In addition, the authors of the TCL literary history were interviewed to gather their views on the content and ideology of the course. This study shows that a new ideology has been accepted by teachers, students and the authors of literary history. According to them the TCL course helps to contribute to the Turkish Cypriot culture and its values. In regard to the content of the TCL course it can be noted that the content of TCL is accepted by both the teachers and the students. However, the authors of the TCL literary history point to the fact that there are deficiencies and irrelevant subjects in the content of the TCL courses. The other research question of the study is to determine the views of the teachers and the students on the way TCL is taught. The teachers and the students are hesitant about the effectiveness of such instruction.
In 1991, the newly elected National Government of New Zealand set in train a major reform of the New Zealand national curriculum and, a little later, a major reform of the New Zealand qualifications system. These reforms have had a major impact on the construction of English as a subject in New Zealand secondary schools, and the work and professional identity of teachers. This article uses as a basis for analysis a framework which posits four paradigms for subject English and proceeds to examine the current national English curriculum in New Zealand for its underlying discourses. In specific terms, it explores questions of partition and progression, and terminology. In respect of progression, it argues that the current curriculum has imposed a flawed model on teachers and students, in part because of its commitment to the assignment of decontextualised outcomes statements ('achievement objects') to staged levels of student development (levels). It also argues that much of the terminology used by the document has had a negative impact on metalinguistic classroom practice. Finally, while it views the national English curriculum as a discursively mixed bag, it notes an absence of critical discourses and a tendency, in recent qualifications reforms, to construct English teachers as technicians and the subject as skills-based.
This issue of L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature is the largest single issue we have produced since our introduction in 2000. Containing seven articles, it covers a range of L1 issues: reform movements, the role of literature, culture and multiculturalism in L1, literacy, technology, reading comprehension and the role of oral and written language in L1 Teacher Education. Authors represent a similar diverse national scope: New Zealand, North Cyprus, France, USA, Hong Kong and Israel. The issue reflects the sentiments expressed in our IAIMTE Conference 2007 theme in Exeter, UK: "Crossing Cultural Boundaries." It represents both the diversity in the field and the simultaneous opportunity to speak to a wide range of critical L1 issues between the covers of a single copy of the journal.
In France, literature has been for a long time the basis for the teaching of French as mother tongue. Today, however, its role and position are being questioned because of both empirical difficulties linked with its daily teaching and disciplinary changes in French didactics. Its formerly obvious use is now giving way to doubts. While some firmly stick to their old positions, as expressed in press pamphlets and media discussions (« C'est la littérature qu'on assassine rue de Grenelle », Le Monde, 4 March, 2000), others try to « remodel » the teaching of French in redefining the functions of its various components (literature ranging at the top) and in finding new ways to link them. These are the issues at stake in the current debate that we hope to clarify through an analysis of the Education Ministry's new instructions on secondary teaching.
In Portugal, the last decade has been characterised by important reforms in the educational system particularly of secondary education. The Portuguese Language Area, comprising different subjects, was submitted to deep changes concerning its aims, content, methodologies, and assessment. In this paper, it is my purpose to analyse some of those changes, focusing on their underlying principles, their main features and their impact both in the pedagogic field and in the public sphere. I consider firstly the political and educational circumstances in which the reconfiguration of the Portuguese Language Area in secondary education took place. Then, I proceed to describe the main features of the official pedagogic discourse that gives expression to such reconfiguration through an examination of the Portuguese Language Syllabus. After that, school textbooks are focused on, in order to understand how they interpret the official discourse and how they conceive pedagogic practice. Subsequently, as a means to capture continuities and discrepancies between pedagogic and public spheres, the analysis deals with a corpus of texts from the media that give voice to positions concerning the teaching of Portuguese. In the last section, according to the analysis previously developed, I discuss the tensions that lie across the Portuguese Language Area and that will probably regulate the directions of its development.
This article reports on some commonalities among the eight education systems in Australia in terms of mother-tongue education. It discusses the context in which mother-tongue education is conducted in Australia, in particular the "competition" to English-as-discipline that comes from "literacy" and from a growing trend towards inter-disciplinary, cross-curricular education.
The new high school Chinese language curriculum in Hong Kong (2002) calls for the integration of literature after more than two decades of emphasis on language skills learning. However, many language teachers do not really know how to incorporate literature instruction into a language class and rely heavily on textbooks. The textbook becomes the "hidden teacher", guiding the content of learning, the sequence of teaching and the approaches to learning. Few teachers investigate the learning tasks designed by material writer(s) and question the nature of these tasks, or the underpinning pedagogy. This article reports on a survey of three sets of commonly used Chinese language textbooks in terms of the structure of learning units and the design of learning tasks for literary texts.
Considered as both the salvation of the educational system and the main agent in the failure of the schooling process, mother tongue education in Brazil is a battlefield between the traditional or grammatical paradigm and the socio-interactionist paradigm. The battle occurs on several fronts from academy to textbook to law, and those who defend the socio-interactionist paradigm are winning most of them. However, the imminent victory of this paradigm can be problematic. The new paradigm needs to consider its excessive pragmatism and utilitarianism, among other difficulties, beyond the classroom. The socio-interactionist paradigm also needs to prove that it is capable of success in an area in which failure seems to be the rule, as shown by institutional evaluations of mother tongue education.
This contribution attempts a partial synthesis of a large international study (Collès, Dufays & Maeder 2003), which explores the teaching and learning of Romance languages in France, French Belgium, French Switzerland and Quebec. Each author analysed in their country or region the official instructions related to primary and secondary school and the plans of action related to teachers' training. All dealt with the same questions. Considering those data, the analysis here focuses particularly on the section of the report concerning the teaching and learning of literature in French mother tongue lessons. Specifically, I address three questions:
1. Over the last 50 years, what place and value has been given to literature in the official programs for primary and secondary schools in the 4 countries or regions, compared to the other subjects considered as part of teaching French?
2. What are today's prescriptions as far as literature is concerned? In relation to the contemporary debate between different paradigms, is literature first handled in terms of skills or in terms of knowledge? Which values are these knowledges and skills bound to?
3. What about the teachers' literature training? Are there important changes in this field which might be similar to the changes in the official prescriptions? Where were and are the teachers trained? What were and are the nature of, the level required and the relative weight given to this particular training?
Mother-tongue education curriculum is in a constant state of debate. Indeed, the field may be accurately characterised as polyparadigmatic. We use three specific sets of analyses to discuss the curriculum variety of the field: ten Brinke's classification of dimensions, Matthijssen's rationality theory and Englund's concept of competing meta-discourses. We then conceptualise the field in terms of paradigm competition, specifically discussing academic, developmental, communicative and utilitarian paradigms. We finish with a case study of the historiography of curriculum paradigms in English.
This edition of L1 is devoted to discussion of debates around paradigms of mother tongue education. In this special issue we have sampled contributions from Belgium, Brazil, Hong Kong and Australia that each take up the kinds of arguments which we have tried to capture in our own chapteron paradigm conflict. Each contribution deals with the polyparadigmatic character of mother tongue education and answers the main question of this issue: MTE paradigms – common? competing? coexisting? In editing this edition, what struck us was the remarkable consistency of the debates across a range of cultures, nationalities and languages.
In this paper we propose that hypertext writing at school could have beneficial effects on the acquisition of content knowledge and the acquisition of writing skills compared to linear writing. We view the effects of hypertext writing on writing skills from the perspective of "shared" cognitive activities in writing linear texts and hypertexts. In a pilot study we examined the effects of hypertext writing on writing processes and we related the occurrence of writing processes to the quality of the resulting writing products. We set up this study to identify students' cognitive activities during hypertext and linear writing. We also tried to determine whether hypertext writing could facilitate linear writing. We focused on the most central, distinctive features of linear and hypertext writing. For linear writing, this is a linearization process: i.e., transforming elements of content into linear text. For hypertext writing, this is a hierarchicalization process: converting a linearly presented line of thought into a hierarchical structure. Students (N = 123) from Grades 8 and 9 performed two linearization tasks and two hierarchicalization tasks under think aloud conditions Results showed that Planning and Analyzing activities contributed to the final quality of hypertexts and linear texts, and that these activities were more often elicited in hypertext tasks than in linear writing. We argue that writing hypertexts stimulates the use of writing activities that are positively related to writing proficiency. Moreover, we speculate that creating hypertext writing conditions and optimizing these conditions for different writer/learner styles might be a theoretical and practical challenge for mother tongue teaching.
This paper argues that new digital genres clash with notions of a 'traditional' version of English, as represented in post-16 Advanced Level Literature exam courses in England. This argument is set within the context of an ongoing political imperative to integrate ICT into the school curriculum together with general optimism amongst many English teachers regarding the potential of particular uses of ICT to enhance teaching and learning in aspects of English (Andrews, 2001; Stevens & McGuinn, 2004). The paper focuses on hypertext which has been the subject of some exciting theoretical claims about its value for literary study, ranging from access to searchable databases, texts and research, to democratising the publishing process and changing the relationship between reader, writer and text (Delany & Landow, 1991; Landow, 1994; Joyce, 1996). The paper draws on a case study of an Advanced Level Literature classroom 'design' within the ESRC InterActive Education Project. The class experimented with the use of hypertext as a tool for researching and writing about literature. This revealed the dissonance between the subject culture of English Literature and the subject culture of ICT. Students attempted to negotiate altered reading and writing practices which were not readily compatible with the assessment demands and classroom practices of Advanced Level English Literature. This negotiation involved different levels of student resistance and compliance with the project of integrating technology into English literature study. The paper ends with some speculations about which aspects of 'traditional' English should be retained and valued in an age of information saturation and multimedia hype.
This article presents a case study of the authoring of computer games by two secondary school pupils (a girl and a boy) in an English comprehensive school. The students' work is analysed as examples of multimodal literacy, in which both narrative and ludic aspects of their games are taken into account. The analysis is set in the context of recent debates about media literacy, proposing that game-literacy can be seen as a subset of media literacy; and that full realisation of it will involve game design as well as game-play. The final section of the article considers a written proposal by a 12 year-old boy for a game based on 'The Odyssey', concluding that the conceptual apparatus of game-design offers new ways to approach narrative in schools.
In their out-of-school lives, young people are immersed in rich and complex digital worlds, characterised by image and multimodality. Computer games in particular present young people with specific narrative genres and textual forms: contexts in which meaning is constructed interactively and drawing explicitly on a wide range of design elements including sound, image, gesture, symbol, colour and so on. As English curriculum seeks to address the changing nature of literacy, challenges are raised, particularly with respect to the ways in which multimodal texts might be incorporated alongside print based forms of literacy. Questions focus both on the ways in which such texts might be created, studied and assessed, and on the implications of the introduction of such texts for print based literacies. This paper explores intersections between writing and computer games within the English classroom, from a number of junior secondary examples. In particular it considers tensions that arise when young people use writing to recreate or respond to multimodal forms. It explores ways in which writing is stretched and challenged by enterprises such as these, ways in which students utilise and adapt print based modes to represent multimodal forms of narrative, and how teachers and curriculum might respond. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to teaching and assessment by bringing writing to bear as the medium of analysis of, and response to, multimodal texts.
This article considers the impact on the teaching of writing and the curriculum, of changes in culture associated with mass media and new means of communication such as the internet. It specifically focuses on the implications these changes might have for the ways in which writing is taught and practised in schooling today. The article is based on interviews with three Swedish upper-secondary school mother-tongue teachers and presents their views on how the writing situation has changed for their students. According to the teachers, the curriculum faces challenges from students' access to and use of mass media culture and computer-mediated communications. For example, the teachers reported that students currently are less interested in grammar and spelling, and more interested in images and layout. Students also use what teachers consider to be plagiarism in their methods of communication. The article draws on media ecology to understand these reported changes in the sense that students are seen to develop new media practices involving several media-specific competences (Mackey, 2002) which gives them access to new ways of meaning-making in their acts of reading or writing. It is tentatively claimed that students may thus develop alternative notions of authors as well as texts, which affect their own view of text production in school. Other theoretical frameworks drawn on in the article include Habermas' discussion of how the public and private sphere fuse and Ziehe's (1989) perceptions of teachers as 'relation workers' in increasingly intimate school environments.
This special issue of L1–Educational Studies in Language and Literature focuses on what it means to teach writing in secondary schools in the age of new media. We approach this topic from the understanding hat people worldwide are now operating within a 'changing semiotic landscape' (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) that is associated with social, economic and technological change. This changing landscape of communication is affecting not only how we read and write, but also is expanding the range of semiotic modes and media with we habitually engage in order to make meaning, communicate and get things done in the world. Now, for example, in order to be fully literate, people need not only to be able to read and write using language and the technology of pen and paper; they also need to be able to comprehend, design, compose and disseminate multimodal meanings using digital multimedia. The new digital media in turn are dominated by the representation space of the screen (rather than the page), the meaning-making mode of the image, and the multiple and non-linear affordances of electronic hypertext. These developments pose significant challenges for teachers charged with the responsibility of teaching language, literature and communication, and it is to precisely to these challenges that the authors in this special issue turn their attention.
This article is the synthesis of research focused on the history of the Romanian mother tongue language and literature curricula of the second half of the 19th century and the 20th century. The curricula I analysed comprise a history with complex syncopated rhythms, periods of re-constitution and recrystallisation alternating with periods of deconstruction and repression. The changes of rhythm are the result of the dialogue between the institutional policies of the Ministry of Education and the language, literature and education sciences. This dialogue was a positive and constructive one in the periods of socio-cultural and economic evolution of the country and absent or extremely tense during the communist period. The article presents a history of the curricular projects for the study of the Romanian mother tongue language and literature by middle and secondary school pupils.
Many studies note the difficulties experienced by young children in learning deep writing systems (such as English and French) compared to those for which the link between the spoken and the written is shallower (e.g., Spanish and Italian). A large percentage of these studies are focused on English. As such, more research needs to be conducted with other first languages such as French. The present exploratory study seeks to understand the effects of these kinds of linguistic variable, along with the impact (which has received little attention) of instructional factors, on the competencies of first-grade, Frenchlanguage writers. Two kinds of instructional context are examined (integrated approach vs code-oriented approach) in two countries (France and Quebec, Canada). The main findings for invented spelling situations within an integrated-approach framework reveal that French and Quebec pupils construct a more complete view of the writing system. This construction includes both units involving the transcription of phonemes by phonograms and units involving the treatment of inaudible, semiographic information by morphograms.
Linguistic factors and invented spelling in children: The case of French beginners in children
(2007)
Most studies in the field of first writing experiences in kindergarten have focused on the behaviour of young English-language writers (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000). By considering increasingly acknowledged linguistic factors in spelling development (Seymour, Aro & Erskine, 2003), the present study seeks to contribute to existing studies of young French-language children in Europe by examining the case of young French-Canadian writers (North America). Drawing on 202 kindergarten children, this study seeks to provide a better understanding of the impact of linguistic characteristics on the production of graphemes in an invented spelling task involving the writing of six words. Firstly, it analyzes the "word" effect on the participants' capacity to produce the appropriate graphemes to represent the phonological information of words (exhaustiveness of the graphemes). Secondly, there is an analysis of unconventional graphemes in order to identify the causes of the deviation from the expected norm. Generally speaking, the findings support the relevance of taking into account the particularities of written French in the spelling development of young French-language children as well as the constructivist view that deviations from the norm are often indicative of difficulties arising from the nature of the writing system to be learned.
Our aim was to characterise the relationships between literacy practises developed in Portuguese kindergartens and children's conceptualisations about the functions and nature of written language. The participants were 16 kindergarten teachers and 160 five-year-old children—i.e. a 1:10 teacher/child ratio. We developed an observation grid to characterise their literacy practises. It covers two main aspects of the teachers' work: reading, writing and metalinguistic practises (14 items) and ways of supporting children's attempts to read and write (16 items). It was used by two observers who spent two weeks in the kindergartens. The kindergarten teachers were divided into three groups depending on their literacy practises. In order to characterise the children's conceptualisations about written language, in October and May we assessed both their perceptions of the objectives and functions of written language and their invented spelling. The results show that there are close relationships between literacy practises pursued by the three groups of kindergarten teachers and the children's conceptualisations about written language.
This article addresses the conceptualizations of written language held by Mayan children who attend bilingual elementary school. The article's attempt to show the results of psycholinguistic research carried out with Mayan children follows the conviction that school-age Maya speakers play an important role in generating knowledge of literacy proposals in the context of bilingual education. By being in contact with two languages (the native language and Spanish), the Mayan children make precise linguistic reflections on Spanish that allow them to infer principles of the graphic and orthographic system of their own language. This article explains those reflections.
When children learn to write, they must ask themselves two basic questions: what part of the language is represented and how is it represented. Their answers are the source of their invented writings. This article reports data from interviews of Mexican Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 5 and 12 and analyses the child’s point of view about the necessity or the possibility of representing stress and some intonational oppositions. Both processes present undifferentiated writings which reveal that for children, at a given evolutionary stage, contrasts in stress and intonation are not retained in writing (which can be considered as an invented "non-writing"). Likewise, there are invented writings that show original ideas about what and how to represent in writing the linguistic contrasts proposed for their reflection; finally, quasi-conventional or conventional writings appear. Reflections on the universality of learning, problems with comparing graphic systems and their respective acquisition processes are also discussed, as serious consideration should be given to the concept that written languages are mixed and linked systems and not monolithic systems.
This paper reports on the developmental and psychometric properties of an early writing task. The study was carried out over four years in Toronto, Canada with L1 English-speaking children. Two cohorts of children who began in Nursery School were followed to the end of their Grade 1 year. Children were administered the same writing task at four time points along with standardized measures of early reading. The early writing task required children to write words and number and word combinations; we examined how children move from understanding print as "objects" to understanding print as representation of sounds. We also examined how writing in Nursery School and Kindergarten related to later literacy skills. The methodology allowed us to examine the extent to which early writing in Nursery School (3 years old) and Junior Kindergarten (4 years old) predicted later literacy skills when children were in Grade 1 (6 years old) and were receiving formal reading instruction. Results show characteristic features of children's early writing of number and word combinations at each of the four grade levels and show that performance on the writing task in Kindergarten predicted reading skills at the end of Grade 1.
This article reports the results of developmental test analyses on literacy conducted with children with intellectual disabilities in Quebec and Brazil. Grounded on studies carried out in Argentina by Ferreiro and Teberosky (1986), with children without intellectual disabilities, we deal, comparatively, with three aspects in the development of literacy in children with intellectual disabilities: their interpretation of fragments of writing, the connection they establish between letters and numbers, and their knowledge of letters. The level of intellectual disability just as the stimulation to reading are taken into account in the analysis of data related to the three aspects previously mentioned. Children with intellectual disabilities develop, in many aspects, similarly to the children without intellectual disabilities during emergent literacy. Nevertheless, they are less consistent in the use of writing classifying criteria, as well as in their discriminating letters from numbers. Although, the level of intellectual disability influenced the children's progress greatly, the acquisition of the knowledge of letters differed mostly in accordance to the level of stimulation to reading.
This paper attempts to present an overview of studies that have been conducted in Greece during recent years on the subject of emergent literacy and, more precisely, on preschoolers' acquisition of writing. Its aim is to present the studies focusing on the subject from an "invented spelling" perspective and to discuss the results obtained. Results seem to be in accordance with the results obtained by similar studies in other countries and in different languages, thus supporting the idea of the existence of a universal character to the ways preschool children conceptualise writing.
This study examines the developmental stages of spelling ability focusing on the learning process of the Japanese orthographic system for native speakers of Japanese. After first providing a basic explanation of the Japanese orthographic system, issues regarding the acquisition of Japanese spelling are discussed. Next, in order to clarify the acquisition of writing skills in the introductory stage of Japanese spelling, data from prior case studies and this investigation are examined. From these results, a new proposal for developmental stages of orthographic concepts is suggested. This study also examines strategies of invented spelling and the relationship between developmental stages and learning ages. Children had learned a considerable amount of hiragana spelling before entering first grade, and by the end of first grade (late March) had reached the point where they were mostly able to write phrases in both hiragana and katakana. The developmental stages were as follows:
Stage1: Hiragana spelling not yet acquired
Stage2: Hiragana spelling acquisition (unvoiced, voiced, semi-voiced)
Stage3: Hiragana spelling acquisition (special syllable markers)
Stage4: Katakana spelling acquisition (unvoiced, voiced, semi-voiced)
Stage5: Katakana spelling acquisition (special syllable markers)
Stage6: Combined usage of hiragana and katakana acquisition
Stage7: Kanji spelling not yet acquired (includes kanji learning stages).
Researchers working on acquisition of written language by children are traditionally more interested in reading than in writing even if, today, spelling and writing have become common subjects of research and the themes of academic conferences. A country as large as Japan, as Tsukada says (in this issue), is just beginning to consider writing as an object of investigation, even though reading is a classic concern in his country. One of the most heuristic research methodologies in spelling is "invented spelling". It is a very simple situation in which a child – most often 4 or 5 years old – is asked to spell words or sentences that s/he has never been taught. These written productions are very meaningful in the eyes of a researcher.
Literary response and attitude toward reading fiction in secondary education: Trends and predictors
(2006)
The present article synthesizes the results of four studies that concern attitudes towards reading fiction and the literary response of students in secondary education. Both cross sectional and longitudinal data sets were created with the cross sectional data used for establishing 'model fit' of both the attitude model and the literary response model. Relations between different components of both models used are charted among reading behavior and relations between model components and student characteristics. The longitudinal data is used to establish trends in attitude and response. Also relations between student characteristics and characteristics of literary education lessons on the one hand and trends in attitude and literary response scores on the other are examined. Results indicate that both the attitude and the response instrument show adequate model fit. Of all attitude components, 'affect' appears to be the best predictor of reading behavior. Response factors appear to be structured in two secondary order factors: 'trance' and 'literary interpretation'. Attitude and response scores diminish with age. Literary education lessons appear to slow down the diminishing trends. The text experience method seems especially promising for stimulating literary response and attitude toward reading fiction.
In mainstream theory about written language skills there is a strong relation between the notion of 'lexicon' and 'phonology'. The work of both researchers and teachers is rooted in this theoretical relation between lexicon and spoken language, which originates from the linguistic tradition of the past century. The problem with this position is that it has never been treated as a real hypothesis, and we should therefore not base our professional work on it without moderation. In the present article my aim is to show how different combinations of psychological and linguistic theories have different options and limitations concerning the relation between lexicon and phonology. In doing so, I claim that the mainstream theory of written language skills—particularly its relation between lexicon and phonology—is not the most plausible and defensible solution. In the present article I claim that it is possible to investigate the relation of speech and writing on a stronger empirical basis, and that this can be done by first giving equal validity to spoken and written language, and second by giving preference to theory with a minimum of introspection. The paper addresses researchers working with written language skills, and teachers who want to reflect on basic assumptions related to their profession. First, some assumptions concerning the mental lexicon in mainstream theory of written language skills are questioned. These assumptions are here linked to cognitivism and linguistic formalism. Second, alternative assumptions are derived from a pairing of functional approaches to language and connectionism. These alternative assumptions may be seen as contributions to a revitalized understanding of the connection between phonology and lexicon when studying written language skills.
Written language skills are dynamic, they develop differently in individuals and are acquired in multiple ways and contexts. Paradoxically, mainstream research on and teaching of these skills is based on a linguistic philosophy that has always valued highly systematic—and static—descriptions. The problem of static perspectives is that they describe only a proficiency related to structures at a given point in time, without any flexible model of reading and writing behaviour. In the present article I claim the socalled 'alphabetical principle' to be an unfortunate product of static perspectives, and which has a very limited relevance when we want to seize the dynamics of written language acquisition. A consequence of my position is that it does not make sense to polemicize whether one should teach 'phonics' or 'whole language'. Before we search for a narrow perspective – a teaching method – we must assure that the basic assumptions we choose to lean on are the best possible. After doing so, we may end up with a narrow perspective that may involve some aspects of what we today know as both 'phonics' or 'whole language'. But the most important goal is that such perspective should make teachers and researchers capable of seizing the dynamics of written language acquisition. In the present article, an alternative approach is suggested in order to maintain dynamic perspectives on written-language acquisition. This approach degrades the role of traditional linguistic description, such as the 'phoneme', focusing instead on a psychological model of 'skill' in which linguistic structures in spoken language play a role as possible cues in the acquisition of written language. It is claimed that this model also carries greater potential for explanation than do static approaches.
Observational learning has proved to be effective with learners of various ages and in various school subjects, including writing. However, little is known about the actual behavior of learners while carrying out observation tasks. In this case study, students' learning activities when processing observation tasks are closely analyzed: six students thought aloud while observing sets of writers as peer models, and were interviewed afterwards. Results suggest that observers carried out many (meta)cognitive activities, especially activities based on the internalization and development of criteria for effective writing (observing, comparing, evaluating, and reflecting activities). These are precisely the activities assumed to play a central role in learning to write. Observational learning seems to stimulate these activities naturally, albeit they are not very evident in typical school writing tasks and exercises.
This paper discusses recent developments in policies and practices of immigrant minority language teaching in the Netherlands. It focuses on the realisation of this provision as 'language support'. Within this arrangement, an immigrant minority language is used as a medium of instruction for parts of the regular primary school curriculum. Following Goodlad et al. (1979), we identify different versions of the language support curriculum on the basis of in-depth analyses of policy documents from the national and local government (the formal curriculum), and the National Educational Innovation Centre for Primary Education and the Inspectorate of Education (the ideological curriculum). In addition, we analyse policies and practices with respect to language support at a multicultural primary school on the basis of observations, interviews, and school documents (the perceived, operational and experiential curriculum). The analyses reveal how policy makers, practitioners, and pupils differ in their understanding of the notion of language support. They also show how inaccurate assumptions with respect to the pupils' relative command in Dutch and the minority language impact on actual practices of language support.
Children in Greece are exposed to a unique literary situation as they live in a monolingual society which uses two different alphabetical systems: the Greek alphabet and the Roman alphabet. Since the school curriculum of preschool education does not include the teaching of Greek or non-Greek letters, environmental print is mainly responsible for primitive hypotheses about letters. In this research 504 preschoolers were tested regarding their ability to differentiate between the two alphabets which circulate widely in the Greek urban print environment. It was showed that preschoolers, although unable to read, were able to differentiate between texts written with Greek or Roman letters. This gives strong evidence for the conclusion that, apart from the major role that visual language plays in the reading of environmental print, information about actual letters is also absorbed by preschoolers.
The six articles presented in this issue of L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature represent both the language and literature domains of the title. More importantly, they represent the first issue as an exclusively online journal with free access to all readers and members of the International Association for the Improve-ment of Mother Tongue Education.
This review of research in college composition divides the field into research focused on the student writer, the teacher of college composition, and the contexts of writing. The period under review is characterized by the "social turn," an effort to situate the writer within social, political, and other contexts in which teaching and writing take place. The author finds that, early in the 21st century, the field of college composition lacks the sort of monolith—such as the "current rhetorical" tradition that has now been largely abandoned—that galvanized teachers and researchers of college composition in the past. As a consequence, the field presently lacks a clear focus or direction.
This review covers what is known in the U.S. as "secondary school," generally encompassing grades 7-12. The author frames the review by looking at the broader assessment context, particularly state-wide writing tests that often trivialize writing by requiring writing within severe time restraints on topics that may be of little interest to students and that may benefit students with from privileged social backgrounds. Further, these assessments reduce writing to limited forms such as the five-paragraph theme, even when the genre called for (e.g., narrative) may not be amenable to such forms. The review finds that assessment mandates in turn affect classroom writing instruction in what the author characterizes as negative ways, emphasizing the mastery of a generic form over the generation of ideas. The review concludes that, in spite all of the attention given to writing instruction, writing is not necessarily improving, in large part because of mandates for how writing is assessed.
The focus of this article is the research literature in written composition from early childhood through the elementary years, typically the end of sixth grade. Some research prior to 1984 is discussed, particularly in topics that were not included in Hillocks (1986), such as emergent writing. The definition of "composition" has expanded over the last decade; thus, while focusing primarily on writing, this article pays attention to other modalities (e.g., relations between drawing and writing) and includes not only writing but also other mediating tools (e.g., drawing, talking, computers) that are used in or for composition.
In 1963 the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) published Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer's Research in Written Composition, a review of writing research covering the first writing studies in the early part of the century through 1962. In 1986 the National Conference on Research in English (NCRE) and the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) copublished George Hillocks's Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching, a volume that reviewed writing research from 1963-1983. The articles included in this special theme issue of L1-Educational Studies of Language and Literature on Writing in School Contexts report the findings of Marilyn Chapman, George Hillocks, and Russel Durst on composition in school settings covering 1984-2003 (for an expanded review of composition studies during this period, see the contributions to Smagorinsky, 2006).
Storytelling and read-alouds have long been integral components of the preschool and kindergarten programs. Indeed, these practices are supposed 1) to demonstrate to children the value of literature and reading through enjoyable experiences; 2) to prepare children to learn to read through the development of linguistic and cognitive skills. These practices, however, have recently been the subject of controversies highlighting their limits. It has been argued, for instance, that storytime is not a « magical silver bullet »: simply immersing children in good literature will not turn them into readers. On the other hand, the use of literature as a teaching tool is often confined to the simplest aspects of narrative comprehension and seldom gives its due to its symbolic and aesthetic dimensions. It will be shown how these limits can be overcome within a literature-based framework where high-quality, demanding literary works provide the basis for an interactive storyreading program including different kinds of activities.
Reading at home in France: A psycho-sociological look at youth literature, youth and their families
(2006)
The reading and the readings of young people are at the crossroads of social and cultural mediations in which the school institution and the family share the first role. During decades, work on the reading of the young people distinguished the readings for leisure and the readings for school. Since about fifteen years, this cleavage does not correspond any more to reality. Well before the learning of the reading, the desire of reading takes its source in the exercise of the mother tongue and in the family uses of print. Reading skills come to reinforce it. The acquisition of a reading practice and the construction of a reader behaviour take place at home according to the choices of youth literature generally presented by the primary school and the beginning of secondary school. With the age of the secondary school, the reader builds two different universes of reading. One is composed of texts prescribed by the teachers and the other of readings called "for oneself". Whatever the age and skills, the dynamics of the activity of reading remains fragile. It rests on emotional investments.
Firstly, literacy practices are situated among the other cultural practices of teenagers, on a basis of research data in sociological, psychological and didactical fields. This enables an illustration of specific features of the relations this group have with literacy. Then research results are related concerning reading practices in general and reading literature in particular. Who proposes reading to which teenagers? Which texts are proposed? Through what medium? What kind of reading strategy is implemented? Moreover, who reads? What sort of literature? With what benefits? Finally, writing is treated. In this area little research data is available, therefore an attempt is made to summarise what is known about young peoples writing practices, using the few available surveys. It should be noted that a researcher who is interested in the literacy practices of today's young people has to take into account the fact that the internet and computers are new tools which aid and encourage reading and writing, and that they create new conditions of literacy practice.
The present report is an overview of six studies that share a common theme: What is the contribution of shared reading to child outcomes. The first three studies are experimental in nature and show that the number of times as well as the manner in which the adult reads to the child will affect children's acquisition of comprehension and spoken vocabulary. The fourth study is an intervention with children who have poor vocabulary skills. The findings revealed that care givers can enhance children's spoken vocabulary by reading books to them in an interactive manner, but that simply reading in their customary fashion may not promote vocabulary acquisition. Finally, the last two studies are correlational in nature. They provide converging evidence that shared reading predicts children's vocabulary, and that, children's vocabulary is a robust predictor of reading comprehension. These latter studies also show the limits of shared reading because parent reports of shared reading did not predict children's early literacy skills or word reading at the end of grade 1.
What characterises children's publishing in France at this time of a uniform worldwide culture imposed in a positive fashion by the 1989 Declaration of Children's Rights and, more dubiously, by globalization and electronic reproduction? Can we speak of the influence on it of a new multinational republic of children through the increasing number of translations from other countries or does French children's literature rest only on a few successful classics such as Jean de Brunhoff's Babar or Charles Perrault's tales, among which Little Red Riding Hood is a world's bestseller? The purpose of this paper is to point out the contemporary literary trends evincing a new awareness of our writers, artist creators and publishing houses expressing the sensibility of our reading public.
Collaboration between the International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education (IAIMTE) and the Education Department of the University of Toulouse II has existed for several years now. Such collaboration has resulted in a desire for face to face contact: the IAIMTE was intent on increasing its French audience,while the French team was able to grasp the opportunity to exchange their French-speaking studies in a broad international context. Thus, the IAIMTE requested the team from Toulouse organise the fifth conference in France (Albi) in 2005. For this conference, we invited specialists from French-speaking countries to present their research and reflections on the role of literature both inside and outside school. This issue presents the corresponding papers.
Funktionsverbgefüge stehen seit jeher in der Sprachkritik, die sich nun auch auf digitale Räume ausbreitet. Vertreten wird dort die These, Funktionsverbgefüge und ihre entsprechenden Basisverben seien äquivalent und könnten in allen Kontexten durch die verbalen Entsprechungen ersetzt werden. Dies kann durch die vorliegende korpusbasierte und textlinguistische Studie am Beispiel des Gefüges Frage stellen widerlegt werden. Anhand eines extensiven Datenmaterials aus den Wikipedia-Artikel-Korpora des IDS zeige ich die semantischen, grammatischen und textlinguistischen Unterschiede zwischen dem Basisverb und dem Funktionsverbgefüge im Gebrauch auf, die sich in der Anreicherung, Verdichtung, Perspektivierung, Gewichtung und Wiederaufnahme von Informationen im Text manifestieren.
The aim of this article is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from the joint analysis of linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouletic meanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a grammatically given semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixing patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs, resulting in a complex interpretation of the text.
The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima's Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima's drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters' utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.
Social media, asthe fifth estate, increasingly influence public dis-courses and play a major role in shaping public opinion.Undoubt-edly, they have the potential to promote participation and democra-cy. On the other side, they also constitute a risk for democratic soci-eties, as the spread of hate speech and fake news has shown. As aresponse,forms of counterspeech organisedby civil society have emerged in social media to counter the normalisation of hate speech and democracy-threateningdiscourses. In order to influence dis-course in social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech campaigns must be visible alsoquantitatively. In this ethnographic contrastive study, I analysed the activitiesof the German and Finn-ish Facebook groups of the network #iamhere international. The in-tensity and continuity of their activities is obviously influenced by their strategic organisation: conventionalised rules support them whereas lacking or inconsequent rules seemed to be counterpro-ductive.
As kindergartens and schools closed down during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, two hashtags emerged on Twitter: #CoronaEltern (#CoronaParents) and #CoronaElternRechnenAb (#CoronaParentsDocumentTheCosts). In this paper, we examine the positioning practices around both hashtags as expressions of “digital activism” (Joyce 2010: VIII). One characteristic of the hashtag campaign is that political demands are hardly ever made directly. Rather, the participants resort to five main linguistic patterns: (1) they address different target groups; (2) they refer to different protagonists; (3) in the subcorpus #CoronaEltern specifically, they constitute themselves as a collective through (4) the recurring use of first-person narratives; (5) and generalization and typification. Our findings show that #CoronaParents are not just parents in times of a pandemic: #CoronaParents are only those who see themselves as such, participating in an evolving, at times misunderstood community.
Am 5. und 6. Mai 2022 fand am Institut für Germanistik der Universität Leipzig der von Adele Baltuttis, Anna Bliß, Barbara Schlücker und dem Autor dieses Berichts organisierte internationale Workshop "Word Formation and Discourse Structure" statt. Gegenstand des Workshops war ein bisher in der Forschung weitgehend unbeachtetes Thema, nämlich die Rolle der Wortbildung für die Struktur und Verständlichkeit von Texten: Inwieweit tragen komplexe Wörter zum Strukturaufbau und zur inhaltlichen Verknüpfung über Satzgrenzen hinweg bei? Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Desiderats sollte der Workshop ein Forum bieten, in dem zu diesem Thema Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Forschung erarbeitet werden. Zwar sind bereits in den 1970er bis 1990er Jahren erste Arbeiten zur Interaktion von Wortbildung und Text- bzw. Diskurslinguistik entstanden, im Anschluss ist das Thema jedoch kaum noch verfolgt worden. Dabei fanden in der Text-/Diskurslinguistik enorme Entwicklungen statt, etwa bei der Einbeziehung neuer Methoden, insbesondere aus der Psycho- und Computerlinguistik oder hinsichtlich elaborierter theoretischer Modellierungen. Der Aspekt der Wortbildung blieb hierbei aber weitgehend außen vor. Der Workshops sollte deshalb neue und bekannte Fragen und Probleme (wieder) aufgreifen und vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Erkenntnisse und Methoden neu diskutieren. Das Thema Wortbildung und Diskursstruktur ist insofern ein neues und interdisziplinäres Thema, das das Zusammenspiel unterschiedlicher linguistischer Bereiche und Traditionen erfordert. Dies zeigt sich auch im Programm des Workshops, das internationale Wissenschaftler:innen aus verschiedenen linguistischen Teilbereichen (Wortbildung, historische Sprachwissenschaft, Diskurs-/Textlinguistik, Fachsprachen, Korpus- und Computerlinguistik) zusammengebracht hat.
Based on the privative derivational suffix -los, we test statements found in the literature on word formation using a – at least in this field – novel empirical basis: a list of affective-emotional ratings of base nouns and associated -los derivations. In addition to a frequency analysis based on the German Reference Corpus, we show that, in general, emotional polarity (so-called valence, positive vs. negative emotions) is reversed by suffixation with -los. This change is stronger for more polarized base nouns. The perceived intensity of emotion (so-called arousal) is generally lower for -los derivations than for base nouns. Finally, to capture the results theoretically, we propose a prototypical -los construction in the framework of Construction Morphology.
"Ausgangssperre light" und "digitales Semester" – Wortgruppenlexeme zwischen Lexikon und Syntax
(2022)
In recent years, the relation between lexicon and syntax as distinct domains has been questioned repeatedly. For all languages under discussion word-like examples that do not fit the category word have been found, so that the boundary between lexical unit and syntactic unit becomes leaky. Furthermore, relative borderlines vary from language to language. One of the problematic domains are phrasemes (phraseological units). This article concentrates on German multi-word lexemes which are very similar to compounds in respect to structure, semantics, and cognitive aspects (rechter Winkel 'right angle'). Though mostly neglected or treated peripherally, this group is not exactly small, and patterns are productive – in contrast to the rest of phrasemes. We argue in favor of a transition between words and phrases and gradient distinctions between categories and a position of the problematic examples close to compounds and rather not among phrasemes. Finally, we look at how theoretical approaches deal with the problem.
This article addresses the controversial question how non-derived denominal verbs (e.g. wingsuit, kennel, trombone) build their argument structures. Based on selected subsets of conceptually related verbs it will be shown that the argument structures of these verbs are flexible though not arbitrary. Without context, these verbs evoke frame-like default situations which are determined by speakers' shared encyclopaedic knowledge and sensorimotor experience and which are mapped onto a small set of abstract event schemata that 'predesign' thematic configurations. The discourse context, which also provides the syntactic context, either meets or models our expectations as to the context-free readings. In the latter case, new (metaphorical) readings are contextually created. These configurations are not arbitrary either because the meanings of verbalized nouns should always be (a) in a relation of contiguity to the base-noun concepts and (b) compatible with the semantics of the syntactic constructions.
Am 2. und 3. Dezember 2021 fand im Haus der Universität in Düsseldorf die von Katrin Hein (IDS Mannheim) und Sascha Michel (RWTH Aachen) organisierte Tagung "Wortbildung und Konstruktionsgrammatik" statt, welche von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) sowie der Gesellschaft von Freunden und Förderern der HHU (GFFU) finanziert wurde. Aufgrund der aktuellen Corona-Lage wurde die Tagung in einem hybriden Veranstaltungsformat durchgeführt, sodass neben den Veranstaltern und fünf ReferentInnen vor Ort weitere fünf ReferentInnen aus Deutschland, den Niederlanden, Italien und Frankreich zugeschaltet wurden. Daneben fand sich mit 46 digital Teilnehmenden aus dem In- und Ausland ein großer und disziplinär breit aufgestellter Rezipientenkreis aus LinguistInnen, GermanistInnen, RomanistInnen, AnglistInnen sowie Literatur- und ÜbersetzungswissenschaftlerInnen ein, die nicht nur die Vortragsdiskussionen bereicherten, sondern insgesamt die bestehende Relevanz des Tagungsthemas unterstrichen.
So-called gender-neutral nouns like Freund*innen, Redakteur_in or AutorInnen are suspected to not fit into the linguistic system. This paper argues that if these forms are pronounced with a glottal stop (e.g. Freund[ʔ]innen), only small changes in the grammar are needed to integrate them. It is shown that the suffix [ʔ ɪn] in these derivatives can be analysed as a phonological word and therefore could be a new suffix that is added to the grammar. The phonological structure of its derivatives is shown to be just like the phonological structure of many native German derived nouns as many suffixes form a phonological word of their own. Also, the insertion of [ʔ] in these derived wordforms can be explained by the status of the suffix as a phonological word. Hence, it is argued that speakers do not ignore the regularities of the grammar when they use gender-neutral nouns with [ʔ ɪn], but rather work with these rules to create new words with new meanings.
This study proposes a cross-linguistic, corpus-based, and constructionist analysis of denominal verbs (DNVs) in English, Dutch and German. DNV constructions include various morphological construction types, such as conversion (e.g. English bottle > to bottle), prefixation (e.g. Dutch arm 'arm' > omarmen 'to embrace') and suffixation (e.g. German Katapult 'catapult' > katapultieren 'to catapult'). We investigate the correlation between the distribution of DNV constructions and the typological properties of the languages, focusing on boundary permeability, inflectional complexity, syntactic configurationality and word-class assignment. The study shows that, although the three languages have the same repertoire of DNV constructions at their disposal, a Germanic cline can be detected in their preferences for non-overt vs overt marking of the word-class change. As such, the study highlights the impact of typological factors on the shape of language-specific constructional networks.
The present study investigates word formation processes and strategies in monolingual and bilingual children by age 7 to 8. Using an elicitation task in form of naming of low frequent complex objects, it is analyzed whether bilingual children use other word formation strategies than monolinguals do. Therefore, N=9 monolinguals and N=9 bilinguals were tested. N=268 elicited reactions were analyzed. Results show bilinguals to use the same word formation strategies to the same extent as monolinguals do. Compounding overweighs derivation in each child. However, a more in-depth qualitative analysis shows that the complex compounds formed by bilingual children disregard the German composition rule of right-hand heads to a significantly higher extent than the monolingual children do. Since this acquisition process has been reported for German monolingual 2-year old children, this result is interpreted as a delayed acquisition process rather than a transfer from the respective first language.
This paper deals with German kinship terms ending with the form "n" (Muttern, Vatern). Firstly, data from newspapers are presented that show that especially Muttern denotes very special meanings that can only be derived to a limited extent from the lexical base: a) Muttern referring to a home where mother cares for you, b) Muttern standing for overprotection, and c) Muttern representing a special food style (often embedded in prepositional phrases and/or comparative constructions like wie bei or wie von Muttern). Secondly, it is argued that the addition of n to kinship terms is not a word-formation pattern, but that these word forms are instead lexicalized and idiomatized in contemporary German. Hence, a diachronic scenario is applied to account for the data. It is argued in the present paper that the n-forms have been borrowed from Low German dialects, especially from constructional idioms of the type ‘X-wie bei Muttern’ and that forms were enriched by semantic concepts associated with the dialect.
The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.
Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed.
This article examines French Verb-Noun compounds with Means value (couvre-pied 'blanket', lit. cover-feet), derived from stative bases. It shows that they are generally ambiguous between Means and Instrument reading. The regularity of this double value discards an analysis relying on verbal homonymy, in favor of Rothmayr's (2009) hypothesis of bi-eventive verbs. We assume that the presence of an agentive as well as a stative component in the verbal bases accounts for the double Means/Instrument value of the VNs studied here. We also examine "pure" Instrument VNs, available with similar verbal bases. We show that the distribution of the Instrument vs. Means/Instrument values relies on the state of the referent of the noun involved in the compound after the event described by the verbal base occurred. A permanent state entails a "pure" Instrument reading, whereas Means/Instrument reading obtains if the state of N is reversible (Fábregas & Marín 2012).
Simple Event nominals with Argument Structure? – Evidence from Irish deverbal nominalizations
(2020)
Deverbal nominals in Irish support Grimshaw's (1990) tripartite division into complex event (CE-), simple event (SE-) and result nominals (R-nominals). Irish nominals are ambiguous only between the SE- and R-status. There are no CE-nominals containing the AspP layer in their structure. SE-nominals (also found in Light Verb Constructions) are number-neutral and incapable of pluralizing and are represented as [nP[vP[Root]]]. R-nominals are devoid of the vP layer and behave like ordinary nouns. The Irish data point to v as the layer introducing event implications and the vP or PPs as the functional heads introducing the internal argument (Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011). Event denoting nominals in Irish can license the internal argument but aspectual modification and external argument licensing are not possible (cf. synthetic compounds in Greek (Alexiadou 2017)), which means that, counter to Borer (2013), the licensing of Argument Structure need not follow from the presence of the AspP layer.
We investigate deverbal zero-derived nominals in English (e.g., to walk > a walk) from the perspective of the lexical semantics of their base verbs and the interpretations they may receive (e.g., event, result state, product, agent). By acknowledging that, in the absence of an overt affix, the meaning of zero-nominals is highly dependent on that of the base, the ultimate goal of this study is to identify possible meaning regularities that these nominals may display in relation to the different semantic verb classes. We report on a newly created database of 1,000 zero-derived nominals, which have been collected for various semantic verb classes. We test previous generalizations made in the literature in comparison with suffix-based nominals and in relation to the ontological type of the base verb. While these generalizations may intuitively hold, we find intriguing challenges that bring zero-derived nominals closer to suffix-based nominals than previously claimed.
Deutsche Komposita haben einige forschungsrelevante Eigenarten, zum Beispiel die Fugenelemente. Kopf hatte deshalb befürchtet, das Thema Fugenelement sei längst "leergeforscht" (S. 1). Natürlich ist kein Thema wirklich leergeforscht. Weil wir verschiedene Ansichten und Einsichten haben. Weil niemand auf Forschungsfragen definitiv antworten kann. Weil sich unsere Sprache – wie alles in der Welt – ständig verändert.
Multiple exponence in morphology has recently attracted a good deal of attention (see, among others, Harris 2017; Caballero & Inkelas 2018). In this paper, I examine Modern Greek verbs which take an extra verbalizer (implicit multiple exponence). The simple base (bare form) and the base with the verbalizer co-exist in the lexicon without any semantic or aspectual opposition and can be used in the same syntactic context. Thus, they raise important questions for morphological theory. I argue that the explanation of this pleonastic addition may be hidden in the relation between inflection and derivation and the polyfunctional character of verbalizers in synthetic languages. Since the two forms co-exist and one member of each pair features an idiomatic association of meaning and complex form, morphological theory is challenged. I argue that these formations find a natural account within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010; Jackendoff & Audring 2019).
In ihrer neuesten Publikation befasst sich die ausgewiesene Wortbildungsexpertin Elke Donalies mit Fällen wie Wetterbeobachter, Dickhäuter, Vergissmeinnicht, zartfühlend und wieviel, deren linguistische Erfassung nach wie vor Probleme bereitet. Grund dafür dürfte zum einen sein, dass die Worthaftigkeit der untersuchten Einheiten vielfach fraglich ist (z. B. zart fühlend als syntaktische Fügung vs. zartfühlend als Wort bzw. Wortbildungsprodukt). Zum anderen ist die Analyse der Einheiten – bei Zuordnung zum Bereich Wortbildung – schwierig und im Resultat entsprechend vielfältig (z. B. Dickhäuter als Derivation, Zusammenbildung oder synthetic compound (vgl. S. 114)). Donalies hat sich also mit der Wahl derartiger "linguistischer Problemmacher" viel vorgenommen und insgesamt drei Jahre Projektzeit im Rahmen ihrer IDS-Tätigkeit dafür aufgewendet (Januar 2015–Januar 2018).
This paper deals with complex prefix-particle structures like aberkennen in German. First, it presents a scheme to analyse these double complex words from a synchronic point of view. Second, it is shown for words with ab-, that this type of word formation is typical for Middle and Early Modern High German and reasons for the decrease are discussed.
This study explores four German nominalization patterns (-ung; -erei; Ge- -X-e; nominalized infinitives) using corpus and web data. We conclude that they can be considered a word formation paradigm, as some functions depend on paradigmatic oppositions. Our case study supports gradual differences between inflectional and word formation paradigmaticity.
Besides some well-established forms like autoritär 'authoritarian'; humanitär 'humanitarian'; new coinages ending with -itär can be found in German. These adjectives are closely related to nouns ending with -ität. From an etymological point of view; these formations are morphologically transparent. Not only are the adjectives new; but -itär emerges as a new suffix.
Die hier zu besprechende Dissertation des schwedischen Germanisten Nicolaus Janos Raag ist an der Universität Uppsala (Schweden) unter der Betreuung von Dessislava Stoeva-Holm entstanden. Die Arbeit will zeigen, welche Rolle Substantivkomposita im Rahmen der Wissensvermittlung und des Kulturtransfers spielen, wie deutsche Komposita lateinisch vermittelte Inhalte in die eigene frühmittelalterliche klösterliche Kultur der Rezipienten integrieren und welche Veränderungen sie dabei erfahren. Für die Untersuchung wurden Substantivkomposita ausgewählt, da sie prädestiniert für die Benennung von bisher Unbekanntem sind und durch ihre binäre Struktur die Fähigkeit besitzen, zwei Größen zueinander in Beziehung zu setzen, wobei die semantische Relation zwischen den Konstituenten eines Kompositums prinzipiell offen und auf morphologischer Ebene nicht ausgedrückt ist.